spacemen in our feeder

In one of my recent posts, I talked about the Grey Squirrel and its marauding ways. Now I have two more mammals to add to my list of bird-feeder pirates.

During the weekend, we went to the Co-Op and puchased a new squirrel-proof feeder. It consists of a slim tube enclosed within a cage with the squares too small for the squirrels to squeeze through. Raccoons can’t fit through those small holes either, but they can take the new feeder off its hook and just toss it off the deck! Once they had cleaned out the spilled food, they began an assault on the older wooden feeder with its hoard of black sunflower seeds.

Just before I went to bed, I switched on the outer lights to see if the raccoons had returned and got a wild surprise. Two little spacemen were cleaning the rest of the sunflower seeds from the feeder! They looked like Red Squirrels, but were golden-brown in color, and had white undersides, a lot of extra folds of skin and big black ‘wombat’ eyes.

Flying Squirrels!!

We know the Northern Flying Squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus) lives in our grey woods, but we haven’t seen them for a while. They not only look different, but move very differently from the Red Squirrels. They are very, very fast and sort of flow and fold themselves across the surfaces they are on, a little like those ‘parkour’ urban acrobats who move fluidly over obstacles.

The two Flying Squirrels argued and bickered with one another and paid no attention to me as I opened the door to snap their photo.

6 Responses

We’ve had the same problems here and finally gave up with sunflower seeds and now, just hang niger seed for smaller birds. Our squirrels and raccoons aren’t interested in niger seed. We live very close to the river, so we had the additional nasty surprise one winter, of rats at our suet feeders. They weren’t long disappearing after we took those feeders down. So for now, we must content ourselves with the niger seed feeders. Chickadees and goldfinches, purple finches and lots of small birds still come. Thanks for this blog. I can really relate to it.